70 pages • 2-hour read
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussion of racism and mental illness.
The Illusory Nature of the American Dream
Many of the novel’s upper-class Indian characters express their aspirations to live in the Global West, in turn nurturing disdain for India and other Indians. Babita’s condescending attitudes towards working-class Indians reflect the prejudices of her social class, which in turn influence how Sunny sees himself. While Sunny seeks to reinvent himself in the United States throughout the narrative, he ultimately recognizes the illusory nature of the American Dream.
A major part of Sunny’s character arc revolves around his legal residency in the United States. Sunny has an important job at the Associated Press and lives in a Brooklyn apartment with his white girlfriend, Ulla. Sunny is on his way to embodying the American Dream, yet he cannot help but feel the artificiality of his life: “[H]is life now seemed at a remove, that it was sometimes unrecognizable to himself […] he was also unsure whether he was behaving from honest impulse or from playing a part, taking his cues from the people, the weather, the food, even the objects around him” (82)
Sunny recognizes that his pursuit of the American Dream already causes him to experience self-alienation, as he becomes more and more unsure as to whether or not he truly likes American culture. His ambivalence is mixed with the guilt he feels over being complicit in the gentrification of his neighborhood. His conscience is too strong to let him accept that other people of color should be disenfranchised just so he can live well. His awareness of his own privilege is confirmed by the affirmation he gets from the families of Satya’s potential romantic interests, like Payal, who are excited about his residence in New York City.
Sunny’s retreat to Mexico represents his final attempt to escape the guilt of his American privilege. In Mexico, Sunny lives among the parasitic white expatriates who take advantage of the economy to improve their quality-of-life. Whereas Payal’s father refuses to move to the United States for fear of being treated like a second-class citizen, Bob and the other expatriates remain in Mexico to get the reverse treatment. The presence of these American expats also speaks to how many Americans do not feel satisfied with the myth of the American dream, either, and have to move elsewhere to find more satisfying lives, just as Indians like Sunny try to do.
In the wake of the September 11th attacks, Bob insults Sunny, which underscores the fact that Sunny will never be accepted as a full American, even when his personal history, legal status, and the principles of the American Dream say otherwise. In returning to India at the novel’s close, Sunny reclaims his Indian identity and feels at peace with who he is at last.
The Role of Strife in Personal Growth
Sonia’s character arc resembles a typical coming-of-age story. When the novel begins, Sonia is at the threshold of adulthood, struggling to untangle her thoughts and discover her voice as a writer. At first, she is lonely and vulnerable, easily falling prey to Ilan’s manipulation. As she navigates her experiences in her romantic relationship with Ilan and her writing career, the novel explores the role of strife in personal growth.
Sonia’s abusive relationship with Ilan impacts her self-esteem and identity, as she feels compelled to give away important parts of herself to placate his moods and tempers. Her disempowerment culminates in the gift of the Badal Baba amulet, which signifies Sonia’s link to her family. When she is thrown out by Ilan’s wife and realizes that she has left the amulet behind, Sonia feels immense guilt because of how easily she sold her family’s protection to purchase order in her relationship. Sonia equates the loss of the amulet with the loss of her own self when she reflects upon Ilan’s painting of her: “When you painted something, some of its life force surely seeped into you. Did Badal Baba now belong to Ilan? Did she?” (456). Consequently, Sonia’s thoughts are dominated by Ilan as she continues to depend on his opinion for validation.
In India, Sonia tries to disentangle her thinking from Ilan’s voice. Her work as a feature journalist for Kala represents a domain of art that Ilan never affected. Sonia’s writing helps her deeply engage with the physical and lived realities of the parts of India she lives in, from the community squabbles of Delhi to the impact of Portuguese colonization in Goa. Sonia’s return home also forces her to reckon with the realities of her parents’ fractured relationship. The shortcomings of Manav and Seher’s characters embolden her to seek independence. With Manav, Sonia sees the importance of following her mother’s path to Cloud Cottage to escape his pride. With Seher, Sonia sees the importance of detaching herself from the past to avoid her mother’s overreliance on nostalgia to live.
It is in Goa that Sonia achieves the self-reclamation her character arc has been building towards. Instead of running away from her fears, represented by the ghost hound, she is encouraged to confront them. Desai therefore suggests that strife is an essential ingredient for growth, as Sonia uses her difficult experiences to become a stronger, more confident version of herself.
The Tensions Between Tradition and Modernity
There are various traditions that separate Dadaji and Ba’s generation from that of Sonia and Sunny. Desai suggests that the values of Dadaji’s generation are unequipped to deal with the issues of modern times, requiring Sonia and Sunny to discover new ways of living and relating to one another. Through these generational dynamics, the novel explores the tensions between tradition and modernity.
Babita contextualizes her meddling behavior as one of the long-term outcomes of the Partition of India: “The turmoil of the freedom movement, independence, and Partition was still about us—our parents were not normal. They were masquerading as normal” (657). The historical turning point of the Partition reset the country’s values, forcing Babita’s generation to grow up in the shadow of their parents’ repressed trauma. Dadaji and the Colonel needed to impose a sense of order in their house to respond to the social upheaval they experienced. Consequently, Manav and Babita could not conceive of any other way to raise their children. Mina Foi exists as an outlier in their generation, representing a member of their generation who never escapes parental control and experiences self-resentment for as long as her parents are alive.
Arranged marriage become emblematic of the generations’ inherited traditional values because such matches rely solely on agreements within the older generation to foster social mobility. Sunny dismisses the proposal to marry Sonia because he is actively attempting to distance himself from tradition and become an independent “modern” man in the United States. Conversely, Satya tries to enter an arranged marriage because he sees tradition as the only way to overcome the challenge of loneliness in the West. During the journey to India, he readily adopts Indian manners as a way of signaling his embrace of tradition. It is only when this tradition fails him that he decides to follow the whims of fate and marry for love. Even then, Babita cautions him against breaking tradition. Satya consequently realizes there is no easy way to overcome his loneliness when he experiences the challenges of his marriage with Pooja.
Whereas Satya falls back on tradition to solve his problems, Sunny and Sonia remain skeptical towards tradition, connecting over their shared disillusionment with their parents’ values. In one of their first conversations, they agree that Indian collectivism is bad, but also agree that American individualism is no way to live either. It is only towards the end of the novel that Sonia resolves this conundrum with Babita, suggesting that they should work together to overcome their loneliness. Their reconciliation signals the younger generation’s attempt to build a bridge with their predecessors through solidarity, proposing that they must find a balance between tradition and modernity to meet the existential challenges of the globalized age.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence